The competition for television audiences, and the difficulty in transmitting wireless television signals to all potential viewers has combined to create a "cable television" market. The cables are capable of conducting signals in a very broad band width from direct current to the gig-a-Hertz range. It is not difficult to transmit many video programs, and the accompanying audio material, simultaneously on a single line. Each modulates a carrier signal of different frequency. In most cable systems, the program material constitutes commercial television program material taken "off the air" and is transmitted to subscribers at television channel frequencies, or frequencies that are converted to television frequencies at the television receiver, to permit signal detection with standard television receivers.
Thus, commercial television programs are available as program material for the cable systems. But, in the case of most cable systems, that is the only economically available source, whereby most cable television merely duplicates broadcasted programs. Both systems use the same receiver and compete for the same audience. One receives its program material from the other, which gives rise to difficult questions about compensation and the economics of program creation.
There is an alternate source of program material. The motion picture industry has a highly developed system and network for distribution of its products on a local community, and even a neighborhood, basis. If the motion pictures that are available to, and are being displayed by, local theaters can be introduced into the local cable television systems, an alternate source of program material will have been made available. That can be done readily with current technology, but there is little motive for the film distribution industry to make good programs available if the cable television system enjoys no economic advantage in providing good programs and cannot pay for good programs.
The cable system owner who delivers video programs to subscribers for a fee, and who must pay for the motion picture programs, is motivated to offer as few pictures, and the lowest cost pictures, that he can without loss of subscribers. Many cable television systems offer customers almost no additional program material except to the extent that they make available more "stations" to the viewer who lives within range of few television broadcast stations. The cable systems introduce little or no competitive incentive to better programming.